


The Sharp Knife (of a Short Life)

by bricoleur10



Category: Leverage
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Flashbacks, Gen, Guilt, Violence, vengeance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:54:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2824151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bricoleur10/pseuds/bricoleur10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all knew that one day Nate would go too far. That he wouldn’t see the risks and push until something pushed back, too hard for them to handle. This is a story about what happens after that day.</p>
<p>Death fic like whoa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sharp Knife (of a Short Life)

**Author's Note:**

> I have no explanation for this story's existence other than apparently one day I was in a really funky mood and wanted to write something off the charts depressing. So, if you've made it past the tags and summary, I thank you, I hope you enjoy it, and I am so sorry.

**The Sharp Knife (of a Short Life)**

 

_“Do you want a cupcake? They have sprinkles.”_

Eliot stops at the bakery on 5th and Pine. He selects one multicolored cupcake with chocolate sprinkles and gets it to go. He eats it on his way to Viktor Mantel’s apartment building. One of the sprinkles gets stuck to the palm of his hand; he sees it later, while he’s washing the blood away. 

\--

_“I think you should sing more often. You’re not as sad when you sing.”_

_“I’m not sad, Parker.” Eliot shakes his head at her. “I’m annoyed.”_

_“Yeah,” she shrugs easily, “That’s what I said.”_

“I should have never let her keep working with you.” Archie spits the words at him, the sun is shimmering in his tears. “This didn’t have to happen. But you. You and your team and your… _perverse_ sense of right, and wrong, and justice. You killed her.” 

Eliot doesn’t bother correcting the older man. Justice hadn’t killed Parker, a hitman with a gun had; but Archie’s not going to be able to see that for a long time. Eliot doesn’t care about that, how long it will take. He won’t be around to see it, and right now all Archie needs is someone to blame, someone to point to as a cause. 

Eliot doesn’t mind being that person. 

\--

_“Have you ever flown? There’s nothing like it.”_

Eliot takes the stairs up to the 9th story apartment. He picks the locks with tools that aren’t his. He could have broken down the door, but he likes the idea of this better. Surprise. Shock. His arrival here will be unexpected; it’ll make his task more pleasant. 

There’s disbelief in Viktor’s eyes when he turns the corner and Eliot is there. Disbelief turns to fear. Fear quickly pools into panic and desperation. 

Eliot breaks his arm before he can reach for the gun tucked into the back of his pants – it’s a surprisingly easy snap, and Viktor doesn’t even scream. He grunts and falls to his knees, but he doesn’t scream. 

Eliot decides that that isn’t good enough. 

\--

_“I stole you a knife. It’s got sapphires in the handle, and Hardison says you won’t use it, but it reminded me of you.”_

Eliot leaves the apartment after only a few hours. He could have made it last longer – he could have made it last forever – and a part of him had wanted to. But he’s got more to accomplish today, more tasks to check off his to-do list. Viktor had pulled the trigger, sure, but he was acting off an order. An order issued by someone that Eliot knows how to find.

He arranges the body in a complicated mess, lets the broken bones and blood speak for themselves, and then he steps back and snaps a picture.

\--

_“Are you even listening to me, man? I’m trying to show you how to work this. You might actually need to use it someday.”_

_“Boys,” Parker huffs exaggeratedly, sounding far too much like Sophie. “Stop fighting. I have cupcakes.”_

Hardison had gotten the phone number, before. 

Eliot uses it now, sends the picture to him. He thinks about it for a minute, pauses and look out the window, sees only the glare of the sun. He glances back at the corpse and sends the text. 

‘One down’

\--

_“You bloody better well be listening to us, Nate. Because if you’re wrong about this…”_

_“I’m not wrong.”_

Eliot knows exactly what his body can handle. After so many years of doing this he’s become a master at reading the cues. 

Except today. Because he knows his shoulder should hurt from the repetitive motion of stabbing, and he can see the bruise on his jaw when he looks in the mirror, from the lucky jab; but he doesn’t feel a damn thing. 

He’s cold, maybe. He keeps shivering, anyway. He doesn’t feel that either. He knows that there are a whole lot of things that he should be feeling right now. He could name them and define them, and even put them in a context if he were so inclined. He’s not crazy; he’s not even in shock. He’s just so furious that if he were to stop and actually let himself feel it he’d end up doing something that he knows he’d regret. 

So he doesn’t feel it and keeps doing things that he knows he won’t. 

\--

_“I don’t understand how you call this football. A bunch of overgrown men in tight pants running up and down a field. Not a sport, as far as I’m concerned.”_

Parker hadn’t trusted Kevin. The first day they’d started running the con on him, Parker had gripped Eliot’s arm tight and looked at him like she’d needed him to rescue her. 

He’d brought his concerns to Nate – make believe concerns and then real ones when the lies had fallen flat. Nate had listened, Nate had nodded, and then Nate had promised that they would be done soon. Eliot had wanted to walk away, with Parker in tow, and tell Nate to go screw himself and his agenda. He would have, too. 

It happened like a wave. Parker wouldn’t leave without Hardison. Hardison had just sent Sophie into a room full of crime lords, and didn’t trust anyone else to monitor the comm and the webcam. And Sophie was too far in by then to bow out gracefully. 

\--

_“Seriously? Seriously? You brought cupcakes to a football game?”_

_She shrugs innocently and looks back at Sophie, who also shrugs as if she can’t figure out why that might be weird._

_“It’s just on the TV,” Parker plops down next to Eliot then and holds up the box. “Do you want a cupcake? They have sprinkles.”_

When the first shot had fired Eliot had gone still. He’d grabbed Parker hard when she’d tried to run. In an instant his brain was filling in the blanks and creating a plan. He’d pushed her against the wall and told her to be quiet. She’d shut up at once and waited for more. 

Eliot had spent half a heartbeat listening, and then told her what to do. As soon as she had lifted herself into the air vent Eliot was running. 

He’d gotten there too late, and he’d known he was going to. He’d had two options, when he’d heard that first shot. Run left, just in case. Or run right, and pray he’d get there in time. 

He’d gone left, just in case there had been a way to save her.

He’d gotten there too late.

\--

Kevin isn’t the biggest player in this particular game. 

Kevin had hired Viktor, and Viktor had pulled the trigger, but someone had paid Kevin to get Viktor to do what he’d done. 

Eliot doesn’t mind working backwards. He used to do it all the time, trace an item – or a mark – all the way up, up through the throngs of people standing in his way. He’d start on the fringe and work his way to the inside; this isn’t much different. 

Then again it’s a lot different, because he doesn’t need to be doing it. He knows where this had all started – had figured it out in two days from some of Hardison’s old computer files and a couple different informants, Archie included - and he could have gone straight there, maybe spared the guys who’d just been doing their jobs and looking for a payout. If not spared them, he could have at least hurt them but let them live. He could have killed them quickly. He could have been merciful. 

He always used to be in the past, when he could afford it. 

But this isn’t the past. 

Parker. Hardison. Sophie. They’d been his. His team, his crew, his family, his mother fucking anything he damn well needed them to be because they were his, goddammit, and fuck the rest of the world that didn’t seem to care about that. 

He’d left mercy behind after that first shot had been fired. 

\--

_“Eliot can handle the guys at the front entrance.” Nate pauses for a moment, and then adds, “Right, Eliot?” as an afterthought, not expecting a complaint._

He punches Nate twice when he finally gets back to the safe house. 

He stops himself after that, and he knows he’d made the right decision in killing them all, one by one, without stopping to breathe. His fury is still there, still pulsing just below the surface, but he’s a little calmer now, a little more in control. 

He knows this, because if he weren’t Nate would be dead right now. 

As it is he’s just on the floor, holding his face in his hands and not getting up. 

Eliot hasn’t thought much about what’s going to come next. 

It’s been ten days – almost to the hour – since that first gunshot. Ten days, six murders, and this is what’s left. 

A hitter and a mastermind. 

\--

_“Y’know, for a criminal mastermind, you seem like a nice guy,” Maggie bumps his shoulder almost playfully, and Eliot doesn’t really know what to do with that._

_A moment of smiles, and then she reaches into her pocket and hands him a card. “I don’t ever want you to have to use this.”_

Maybe he has a little mercy left after all. 

He waits a day and a half for Maggie to show up – keeps Nate from drinking himself into a coma – and even explains to her, in clipped words that lack emotion, what had happened. 

“It was an old enemy of Sophie’s,” he explains to the wall just over her left shoulder. “This guy, William. He’d been stalking us for months, waiting for the right time to do this. He paid one of our marks to take her out during a con. The hitman that our mark hired didn’t stop there.” 

“ _God_ ,” Maggie sounds devastated. Heartbroken. 

Eliot thinks about how he’d never gotten around to taking Hardison fishing. 

“They’re not a threat anymore. Any of ‘em. But Nate’s…not doing so well.” Eliot shrugs. “I can’t handle him right now. I didn’t know who else to call.” 

“Do you…do you blame him for this?” 

_“Parker doesn’t trust this guy, Nate. I don’t know why, but she wants outta this job. And so do I.” He narrows his gaze and waits._

_“Because Parker’s got…what? A bad vibe?” Nate snorts. “I don’t even know what to do with that.”_

_“You could listen to me.” The hitter growls._

_“We’ll be done with the con soon, Eliot, okay? I promise. No one’s gonna get hurt on this one.”_

He clears his throat and finally meets Maggie’s stare. “Yes.” 

\--

_“We’re a little more than a team, y’know?”_

_Eliot doesn’t respond, but he knows that the hacker can see him smiling._

By the time Nate wakes up that day Eliot’s been gone for hours. 

He doesn’t plan on coming back, but he has a feeling that Maggie won’t tell Nate that for a while. 

Maybe someday he will. Someday, when he can get over what Nate had done and forgive himself for not pushing harder. 

Parker hadn’t been the only one with a bad feeling that day.

He’d known. 

He’d known from the moment they’d walked into that one that something about it wasn’t right. Parker had felt it, too, but Eliot had _known_. He’s worked too long in this business to not trust his instincts, and if Nate hadn’t been there, maybe he would have pushed harder. 

But Nate had been there, Eliot hadn’t pushed hard enough, and now his family is dead. 

There’s no coming back from this one. 

\--

_They don’t have a case today, nobody to save, no parts to play. It’s one day out of a hundred that they get to spend like this, relaxing with each other._

_Hardison and Eliot decide to watch the game on Nate’s TV. They call Parker, because Hardison always wants to be around her, and Eliot would feel marginally guilty not including her. She shows up with Sophie, because apparently they’d been out shopping together._

_Hardison had been in the middle of explaining a feature of the phone to Eliot, who hadn’t been paying much attention at all, when the two girls had gotten there._

_Eliot notices their arrival – Sophie looks haggard, while Parker’s grinning brightly and carrying a large white box - as Hardison says, “Are you even listening to me, man? I’m trying to show you how to work this. You might actually need to use it someday.”_

_Eliot rolls his eyes. “I know how to work the damn phone, Hardison.”_

_“No, you don’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”_

_“I swear to god, man, if you don’t can it soon with this, I’mma show’ya where you can put that phone.” Eliot growls._

_“Boys,” Parker huffs exaggeratedly, sounding far too much like Sophie. “Stop fighting. I have cupcakes.”_

_Both of them stop their bickering to look up at her._

_Eliot blinks at her while Hardison sputters and says, “Seriously? Seriously? You brought cupcakes to a football game?”_

_She shrugs innocently and looks back at Sophie, who also shrugs as if she can’t figure out why that might be weird._

_“It’s just on the TV,” Parker plops down next to Eliot then and holds up the box. “Do you want a cupcake? They have sprinkles.”_

_Eliot rolls his eyes, albeit almost fondly, and takes the offered cupcake after she pokes him a few times._

_Sophie sits down next to Hardison then, sighing dramatically. “Next time I want to go shopping, I’m taking one of you two.”_

_Eliot exchanges a mildly terrified look with the hacker._

_“I have no sense of fashion.” Hardison says immediately._

_Eliot points out that, “I scare people.”_

_Sophie looks at them both for a moment and then nods, as if confirming something to herself. “Good,” she says, directing her comments to Parker. “I’ll take Hardison to that new designer store next week and then, well, Eliot can come with me to Macy’s one day sale.”_

_While the two men gape at each other, and then Sophie, the grifter ignores them both and flips on the television. “I don’t understand how you call this football. A bunch of overgrown men in tight pants running up and down a field. Not a sport, as far as I’m concerned.” She says, tossing the remote to Eliot when the game comes on._

_“Did you just…”_

_“You did not just…”_

_“I want a Dr. Pepper.” Parker says then, as if she hadn’t heard the last minute of their conversation at all._

_“Why?” Eliot asks dubiously._

_“To go with my cupcakes.” She rolls her eyes at him like he’s the one who’s a little bit crazy._

_They watch the game, they bicker and argue, Eliot yells at the screen, Hardison yells at Eliot, Parker asks about the rules, and Sophie continues to grumble, though she doesn’t leave._

_It’s a good day._


End file.
